Unlike flat goods such as woven or knitted fabrics, there is a significant variation in shade for pile and napped textile materials when viewed from all four directions. A non-limiting example of pile fabrics includes carpeting. Shade is determined in terms of either color hue, chroma or C.I.E. laboratory values. Traditionally, the measurement of shade of pile and napped materials is accomplished by determining color by utilizing a spectrophotometer to read color from a single fixed position. There are several kinds of spectrophotometers that use either a "0/45" or a "45/0" geometry. This requires the pile to be compressed under a glass plate since the sample is observed from a fixed angle of either zero or forty-five degrees. There are also geometries that are classed as "0/0" meaning that the viewing and illuminating angles are the same and compression of the pile is optional. However, no attempt to use robotically-moveable bifurcated fiber-optic cables with "0/0" type spectrophotometers exists. Furthermore, the size, cost, and complexity of the present textile shade monitors that are capable of reading in a "0/0" direction has prevented their use for directional shade measurement. The directivity of shade is then estimated by measuring the pile angle of the textile material and determining the pile height of the textile material and then developing statistical correlations. This is a very complicated and time consuming approximation that is inaccurate due to the failure of mathematical models to account for actual material and colorant variation. The present invention solves these problems in a manner not disclosed in the known prior art.